In these years, pollution by exhaust emission of automobiles has been becoming the social problems, and a variety of technology to compete with the problems with the pollution by exhaust emission is being developed in each industry sector. Examples of such technology include catalyst purification systems for exhaust gases, a new type diesel engine, direct blast gasoline engine, and so on. Virtually nothing, however, has been reviewed on measures to compete with exhaust emission from existing automobiles, and no measures have currently been taken against an explosive increase in the number of automobiles particularly in the developing countries.
On the other hand, Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. 8-218,956 proposes a unique technology about an intake apparatus of an internal combustion engine. This technology is designed to apply a substance containing an alpha-decaying radioactive isotope to an intake system for an internal combustion engine. This technology comprises converting nitrogen in air into oxygen and hydrogen by irradiating intake air with alpha-particles, so that it can raise the temperature of oxygen in a combustion chamber and utilize hydrogen as a portion of fuel, thereby achieving improvements in fuel economy and purification of exhaust emission.
The prior art technology utilizes a substance that spontaneously emits alpha-particles. There is none of naturally-occurring substances but very few that can spontaneously emit alpha-particles; however, the amount of emission of the alpha-particles is extremely small and a large majority of the substances can emit only one alpha-particle or less at the very most for one minute. Therefore, emission of alpha-particles in such a small amount could not be practically applied for improvements in fuel mileage and purification of exhaust emission, so that for that reason it has come to the conclusion that the above Japanese patent application was abandoned on Aug. 30, 1996.